Calculating return on investment for communications is critical to commercial growth…fortunately, it has just gotten a whole lot easier

You may be reading a lot more these days about measuring public relations, but the truth is that measurement isn’t a new concept or a new practice. Measurement has been around for as long as businesses have had to show a trajectory of success.

Performance metrics are commonly used to illustrate a company’s sales developments, customer retention rates and overall financial health. These metrics are often represented numerically—and there’s the rub. In communications, we rely on the word, not the number. The complexities of analyzing content—attributing tone, relevance, prominence, and visibility—have historically made PR and measurement an unlikely pair.

But PR measurement is becoming the communications industry’s new best friend. Some might say this is driven by economic pressures to demonstrate better return on investment (ROI), or it may be the maturation of an industry whose value has often been underappreciated. Regardless, most agree that gaining concrete results is critical to success. And knowing what elements of a campaign produced the results creates control over that success. Measurement gauges that control.

Perhaps the greatest advance in media measurement is the development of sophisticated tools to aggregate and, more importantly, automatically analyze information across all media. With these tools, PR professionals are empowered to measure, understand and compare how their companies (or clients) and competitors are perceived in the media.

You are no longer relegated to aged clip books or defensive summaries to respond to the dreaded “what have you done for me lately?” question. Measurement and business intelligence should be utilized through all stages of the communications process.

Initiating measurement best practices up front

At the beginning of a new client relationship or the launch of a new initiative, the key measurement is the audit of where the company stands within the market. This figure sets a baseline for the company’s market visibility, the prominence of competitive messages and the opinions of journalists and analysts.

Throughout the course of a campaign, evaluating the effectiveness of your program will help correct a message or an approach that is not effective. Feedback lets you know immediately if your message is resonating with the press, if your competitor is gaining mind share or if a prominent journalist is swaying opinion. Periodic measurement identifies publications where your client has “zero mind share” and helps to reframe pitches to support continued interest and potential market demand.

At a quarterly, monthly or yearly review, measurement helps make sense of complex results and highlights tangible benefits as reflected in coverage, market share, brand awareness and reputation. And of course, let’s not underestimate measurement’s ability to account for last year’s efforts and secure the future budget.

Does measurement still sound like a useful but vague application?

If so, here are several measurement best practices (and some results) derived from the PR programs of three companies:

Connect—Don’t be an island. Map your communications activities against results throughout the company. See if there are correlations between your work and the outcome of sales, marketing initiatives, web traffic or advertising. As more companies view their brand activities holistically (and their budgets more conservatively), they’ll want to see how PR fits into the picture.

Example: Ebusiness solution provider DigitalThink worked to integrate PR activities with the company’s high-level goal of shortening its sales cycle and reducing the cost of customer acquisition. By working with news media to educate local markets about the DigitalThink value proposition, its communications department was able (through measurement) to show how its efforts successfully paved the road for the sales team.

Benchmark—Sure, a PR goal can be “to increase market visibility” or “to improve customer perception” but compared to what baseline? Performing periodic miniaudits helps chart where your company or client stands in comparison to the competition.

Example: A major pharmaceutical company was planning to announce new messaging for a product during a tradeshow and wanted to know how this effort was going to affect market perception compared to their competitors. They benchmarked the total numbers of their mentions and competitor mentions in the weeks leading up to the tradeshow. They also took note of the sentiment and the messaging in both their coverage and their competitors’ coverage. After the tradeshow, they were able to compare the coverage before, during and after the tradeshow to see how their announcement affected the market.

Monitor—Running a communications campaign is like sailing: set a direction but don’t leave the helm. Continually gauge the impact of your work with the media. Don’t wait to analyze quarterly clips to determine how you could have sharpened your communications focus.

Example: 3Com’s communications team defined several key areas it needed to measure, including how the press covered issues relevant to 3Com. To measure this, 3Com tracked issues across lists of target publications and journalists. 3Com determined how its messages were breaking in the press and used these results to create opportunities that helped the company sell more products and services. By improving access to breaking news, the company was also able to respond immediately to less-visible coverage that affected corporate reputation.

Clearly, the days of measurement as a retroactive, labor-intensive (information-gathering/clips-gathering) process or as a defensive response are gone. Today, measurement happens early on and throughout a campaign.

Agencies and internal communications groups’ effective use of analysis is making measurement an integral part of the planning process, as well as improving the current and future performance of communications campaigns. We’ve come a long way from counting clips.

You Mon Tsang is founder and CMO for Biz360, the leading provider of active market intelligence that drives business performance. For a free Measurement Scorecard to benchmark your communications measurement against industry leaders, please email ytsang@biz360.com or visit www.biz360.com.